


No Longer Human

by babywarg (morphaileffect)



Series: Ironstrange Bingo [15]
Category: Doctor Strange (Comics), Iron Man (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Extremis Tony Stark, Introspection, M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 09:55:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19170928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morphaileffect/pseuds/babywarg
Summary: Magic is changing Stephen. Technology is changing Tony. When their transformations are done, will there be anything human left?





	No Longer Human

**Author's Note:**

> I know very little about Stephen and Tony from Earth-616, but two specific scenes from the comics inspired this: 
> 
> 1) the one where it’s revealed that Stephen can no longer eat human food, and instead eats gross alien stuff that “tastes like leprosy” and afterwards makes him feel “like there’s a Holocaust in my intestines” (Doctor Strange #4 [2016]), and 
> 
> 2) Tony confessing to a roomful of strangers that “I built myself a shell and I disappeared inside” (Invincible Iron Man 500.1). Extremis is also a factor.
> 
> Apologizing in advance: this may seem a little hard to read; I don’t know how to present this except as a stream of consciousness thing. Takes massive liberties with canon.
> 
> For the Ironstrange Bingo square “Sensual.”

There were many things Stephen didn’t know about being Sorcerer Supreme, before he took on the task.

Among them was that the changes to his body and mind were going to be permanent.

Sustained exposure to magical elements made his stomach unable to process human food. Listening to many different voices in his head sometimes made it difficult to know which one to listen to.

And frequent jaunts into weird and irrational worlds made him forget what “normal” meant.

He began to recognize that it was becoming difficult for him to be attracted to other humans, in the “normal” sense.

Pheromones, it must be - his old scientific brain making sense of the unexplainable. He was consuming non-human food, using magic constantly, and it was affecting his body chemistry.

He wasn’t exactly repellent to other humans - he simply didn’t _smell_ like one of them. And they weren’t even aware of it, but it affected how they regarded him.

He confirmed this by peering into their thoughts.

_Strange. He was strange._

He didn’t live as they did, didn’t play by the same rules. Didn’t have to stay in the same shape.

What was it like to be stuck in a decaying human shell, to crave human things - to long, for example, for the smell of freshly brewed coffee, someone else’s touch, the sound of his name in someone else’s lips?

He was slowly starting to forget.

Little by little, the food he ate and the air he breathed and the magic that coursed through his body burned away what it felt like to be human.

Little by little, he was turning into something else.

 

***

 

Thousands of nanobots in his bloodstream, under his skin. Part of him already machine - not only keeping his body in top shape artificially, but quite literally keeping him alive.

_Extremis._

The enhancements made him perfect. He no longer needed as much sleep or food or stimulation as he used to.

He began to move at an automatic, unfamiliar pace, almost as if his body were not entirely under his control. In striving to keep up, he started to forget some things. He started forgetting, for example, what it felt like to think and move sluggishly, or to fear pain, to suffer illness.

To _want._

He was even forgetting how it felt like to be drunk. Why had he been so addicted to alcohol? How pleasant could it have been? The clever little robots in his body had fixed the raw, aching need. The memory of pain fleeing his body as soon as the chemicals hit was starting to grow dimmer by the day.

He was starting to realize that craving - for relief, for satiation, for success, for human connection - had been an essential part of him. And when the machines inside him took most of it away, they ironically left an empty space, which only grew emptier the less he wanted.

He wondered if one could still remain human without desire.

_I’ve got iron in my blood._

_I’m the man of steel._

He still cracked jokes.

Maybe his jokes were still funny.

He was just slowly forgetting how to laugh at them.

 

***

 

A magical entity was wreaking havoc on his microscopic circuitry. Tony knew exactly where to go.

“I think I might be a little possessed,” he said at the door. “I need your professional medical opinion.”

Stephen Strange took one look at him and immediately knew what to do. He let Tony walk into his Sanctum, led him straight into a dark room with nothing in it but a complicated symbol glowing on the floor.

He ordered Tony to lie down in the middle of the symbol. He knelt nearby, and let his glowing, slightly shaking hands hover slowly, mere centimeters over Tony’s skin.

The procedure sent small shudders up Tony’s spine. He lay still, and tried his best to keep his mouth shut, as ordered.

It was...

Kind of hot.

And it was a weird feeling. One that, at first, Tony thought he had not felt in a long, long time.

He only realized later that it was one he had not felt _ever_.

It wasn’t simple attraction, not the kind that one human being felt for another.

Maybe it was part of it, but only a very small part.

It was.

_Strange._

Like something about this man called out to be touched.

By him.

He couldn’t read the expression on Stephen’s face. Was the attraction reciprocated? He had no way to tell. The instruments built into his body and brain told him precious little - the sorcerer’s body seemed to defy measurement, seemed to exist partly on this plane, and partly elsewhere.

“Maybe we should meet like this more often,” Tony quipped.

Stephen grunted.

A sort of laugh. He’ll take it.

The procedure was over much too quickly for Tony’s liking. Stephen promised him that the magical entity that had invaded the nanobots in his veins (had placed a virus in the virus, was the simplest way Stephen could put it) had been arrested.

The purging would have to be done in increments.

“You’ll have to come back,” Stephen cautioned. “I need to perform the procedure again a couple of more times, just to make sure it’s all gone from your system.”

“Looking forward to it, Doc,” Tony quickly answered, surprising himself with his own sincerity.

Stephen only nodded, and let Tony leave.

A magical transaction could and _should_ be that simple.

But Stephen saw many things that other ordinary humans couldn’t. He had long stopped trying to describe them.

He saw Tony as a bright star. And it wasn’t just the metal. It wasn’t just that his senses were different now.

There was an aura of loneliness all around Tony.

It burned so brightly that Stephen felt like a moth to its flame.

It was.

_Stark._

It hurt to look directly into Tony’s eyes.

And he almost couldn’t wait to do it again.

 

***

 

Even after Tony was completely “cured,” he still found himself going back to the Sanctum. And every time, he found the Sanctum’s doors opened to him, its Master waiting.

With the entity purged from Tony’s body, it was hardly conceivable that they would have anything left to do together. But each time they met, they got to talking, for hours - about things that they never knew mattered to them, until they said them aloud to another person.

Neither man knew how things fell into place that way. They simply did.

Tony likened it to when he sent radio signals out into space when he was a child. He would try different frequencies - first the ones closest to Earth, then the ones farther out.

“Hello, hello,” he would say into the void, “is anybody there?”

It felt as if he had gone so very, very far out, and had not received a reply.

Stephen, on the other hand, likened it to throwing a message in a bottle into a sea of stars. He had written down the coordinates of his location on that message, hoping someone could find the bottle and, in turn, find _him_.

Somehow, their call into the void and their message in a bottle met.

The two of them regarded each other first with suspicion and curiosity, all at once.

But over time they learned how to decode each other. To read each other aloud.

“Do you ever get the feeling that you’re not really...you, anymore?”

“We’ve been transformed by the things we experience regularly. It’s to be expected.”

“Transformation is one thing, but the isolation...I sure didn’t expect it. I would’ve thought that with more power, being in the company of other beings who are just as powerful or more, we’d feel less alone.”

“Powerful beings are essentially alone. But in the case of humans, power may have little to do with it. Ordinary people keeping their distance from you is probably natural. Everyone on Earth knows your story. They know how you’ve beaten the odds, risen above them in a way that they never could.”

“Is that it, then? We can’t connect to other people because we’ve been reduced to our redemption stories?”

“Other people can see their own stories in yours. But they don’t know what you’ve gone through, what you’re going through now. You’ve survived way more than anyone else can understand. And because of that, it’s hard for you to relate to just ‘anyone else.’”

When they were together like this, outside of and away from everything else, there was almost a sense of...normalcy.

They could almost overlook that the parts of them that were drawn to each other, were the parts they couldn’t recognize.

 

***

 

Over many months, they started to develop a sort of code. They spoke to each other in ways that no one else could understand, ways that only they could appreciate.

And the jokes, for Tony, were the most important part of that code. No one would laugh at his jokes, but Stephen would smile - flash that small, subtle, quiet expression that almost seemed mocking, for a fraction of a second.

And it would make Tony’s day.

Because that smile had come to mean something to him. It was the smile of the person he had come to trust more than anyone. The person with whom he connected more than anyone.

The two of them shared a secret, and that secret was

(that one of them had asked: “Would you still call yourself human?” And the other had answered: “I don’t know.”)

that they had started meeting in the Sanctum, or in Tony’s private quarters.

Clinging to each other as they drew further and further away from familiar things.

It wasn’t even usually about sex. Each body recognized that the touch of the other made blood run hot. They felt each other’s presence so fully, so intimately, as if they were the only two things they could feel in the entire world.

A world to which they were no longer certain they belonged.

“Do you remember,” the man of science asked, lying in bed with the man of magic, holding and being held close, “how it feels like to be in love?”

Stephen reluctantly answered, “Vaguely.”

After a long, thoughtful pause, Tony asked, “Is it anything like this?”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Glitch in the System](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20887505) by [Meaningless_Mayhem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meaningless_Mayhem/pseuds/Meaningless_Mayhem)




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